The present invention relates to a technique for processing large quantities of documents to be circulated and, more particularly, to a method and system for effective management (including distribution) of workflow, for example, in companies, corporations, government offices, and other such organizations which employ centralized operations for accepting large amounts of documents and distributing them to persons in charge according to the contents thereof.
For the purpose of improving collaboration of the work to be performed in the actual distributing operations to improve office workers' productivity, such a system which supports the work procedure (or workflow) through involving the cooperation of a plurality of office workers has been increasingly demanded.
One such known workflow managing system, to those skilled in the art, is an electronic mail system. The electronic mail system refers to a means for exchanging or transferring messages between computers through a network. Numerous workflow systems for an electronic mail system have been previously made known.
In a system as that disclosed by Akira Matuo, et al., in a paper entitled "Application of Agent Mail System to Workflow Management", pp. 59-66, in the Research Report, Vol. 94, No. 60, 14 and 15 July, 1994 of the Information Processing Society of Japan, a workflow management system is implemented by using an agent mail system which performs automatic processing of electronic mail messages according to rules (agent scripts) described for user individuals.
In the aforementioned prior art, each user uses his or her own rule description language, called agent script, to describe messages and processings to be carried out therefor in the form of an agent script and to perform workflow management based on the contents of the agent script.
In the prior art workflow managing system, a user describes addressees of a document to be circulated in a description language such as a script. This system is advantageous in that the next workflow entrance location or workflow destination can be accurately described flexibly, and the system can be efficiently used for fixed formatted tasks because description contents can be modified and customized as necessary.
For such operations that a company organization accepts, at its one department, large quantities of documents generated outside the organization, however, the system is disadvantageous in that distributing of the documents to associated persons in charge requires a heavy burden to be imposed on the worker doing the distributing (distributing worker). The system user in charge of such distributing works must understand the contents of all the documents and, also, describe the next workflow entrance locations of the documents, one by one. In particular, when the document contents is specialized, it will inevitably take a lot of time for the document distributing user to understand the contents of the documents. In addition, it takes lots of time to train such an operator that can rightly determine the next workflow entrance locations of the documents.
In this way, the greater the quantities of documents to be handled are, the greater is the burden imposed on such a user who is to determine the next workflow entrance locations of such large quantities of documents. For this reason, there has been demanded a means for lightening such user's burden.